“Your Unibrow is Cool”— From “15 Reminders for Every Improviser,” by “The Good, the Bad and the I-5” cast member Angel Sudik.

So there they were, those diligent writers from The Second City comedy troupe, just minding their own business — or rather, minding our business — as they tried to craft a sketch show about San Diego.

And just when they thought they had the thing wrapped up, along comes a breaking news update (or 12) from City Hall. Time to kiss that dream of a finished script goodbye.

It’s a good thing Second City’s troupers are experts in improv, because at the rate the political situation has been changing lately they may end up having to reconceive the show in mid-performance.

“It’s very top of mind,” Second City writer-performer John Hartman acknowledged late last week about revisions to “The Good, the Bad and the I-5,” the satirical piece the Chicago-based company brings to La Jolla Playhouse starting Tuesday. “We were working on it even a few minutes ago.”

Not that the show will be all scandal, all the time. Hartman and his fellow writers spent significant quality time in town earlier this year on “a kind of fact-finding mission — we kind of had to act as investigative journalists, interviewing people and trying to get them to go past (topics such as) traffic and the weather.” (Full disclosure: The U-T was one of their stops.)

What Hartman says they came up with was a broad tapestry of stories that in some ways defy the clichés about our town.

“The lifestyle that we maybe associate with Southern California — there was something about San Diego’s version that wasn’t quite the same,” Hartman reports. “It was casual, but nothing along the lines of what you think a beach town might be — flaky or (completely) laid-back. San Diego was the nice version of it.”

The research included some requisite check-ins, from Sea World to the beach. The visitors hit the waves in La Jolla with the Surf Diva surf school, and Hartman reports that he stood up once and even managed not to hurt himself. (“That’s a victory every day,” he notes.)

Hartman adds that while comedy comes first, the six-performer show (which represents Second City’s third visit to the Playhouse in two years) won’t shy away from the touchier topics.

“There’s a pretty big motto we follow, which is that there’s truth in comedy,” he says. “If you can look and find even a germ of truth or realness in what you’re doing, that’s the thing that can strike a nerve with people. And they can relate to it and not feel as though you’re taking on too heavy an issue.”